Norwegian Princess Part I

So this past weekend i left london and travelled north to the wonderful country of norway!!!! i went with my flatmate courtney and then another girl named jenna. this trip can be summed up in a few words which i will now list:
1. early mornings

2. expensive

3. wrong turns

4. way too much walking

So our plane left london at around the amazing time of 6:30 in the morning so we had to stay the night in the airport in able to make our plane because we flew out of stansted which is about 2 hours away and just yeah. we didnt really know what to expect sleeping there but once we reached stansted at like 2:30 am we were really surprised, the airport was packed with people sleeping. so packed we had a really hard time finding a place to sit. we eventually plopped down in the middle of the floor and tried to sleep, the whole place had the atmosphere of a giant sleepover with about 500 of your friends, it was brilliant! so we landed in oslo and then we had to hop a bus to get into the city center (which took about an hour and a half...i totally crashed!) we found our hostel, dropped off our stuff, and went in search of food since we hadnt eaten in like 14 hours...ouch. after food we went exploring! what we found first is a 7-11, which really surprised us, then we found another one on the next corner. no joke about everyother block had a 7-11 on it. it was insane!!! but we also found the royal palace, lots of statues, a bit of snow, and the harbour (<--- my favourite place).

here i am with a gaurd at the royal palace...i liked his floofy feather, genius.the view from the top of a hill looking into the harbour...

we bummed around a bit just sitting on the docks eating ice cream and people watching, it was a nice day and we just sat around and enjoyed it.

the giant clock that we sat next to on the docks...basicaly the big ben of oslo :)100 krowns, we thought that she looked very pretty but was really sad. this is about 17 dollars, not bad until you look into mcdonalds and see that that is gonna run you around 60 krowns. ouch its expensive.

after a bit we headed back to the hostel to check in and rest for a bit since we had a really long day so far. once we got there we slowly started going down hill since we were each running on about 3 1/2 hours of sleep. so we soon called it a night and went to bed around 22:30 or 24:00 because we had to catch a train to bergen the next day fairly early. so day one of a norwegian adventure was done.

we caught the train from oslo to bergen and it was about a 7 hour trip in total. we all crashed again and when we woke up we found ourselves travelling through a winter wonderland!

the countryside as we slowly got into heavier snow...

snow piled up on the side of the train tracks...insane. i havent seen that much snow for a bit

a house burried in the snow...

and another...and then you have some more snow...

this was one of the nicest train ride i have ever taken, the 7 hours just flew by it was really nice i never felt board or anything so that was nice. we were in the snow for about 3 hours and as drastically as we entered the snow it was gone. we had tons and tons of snow going into a tunnel and about 45 seconds later when we came out the other side there was no snow at all! it was insane! so once we arrived in bergen we marched on to our hostel with the coolest name ever, the montana hostel. YES! brilliant! i love it! the only thing is that our hostel is way out far away from the city center, opps. didnt realise that when we booked it, we were so intranced by the name. amazing name did i mention??? so we dropped off our stuff and went exploring. we found these cable cars that take you to the top of the highest mountain in bergen (7 surround the town, which by the way is the second largest in norway. ALSO the city of london has more people living in than all of norway. just so you know) a man told us that its a nice little trip down the mountain so we decided to take a cable car up and then walk down...yeah great idea, NOT.

me looking over bergen, looking over my people...one of the signs telling us which direction to go....i loved it!going down the mountain. after the bar left we had to get down a dried up creek bed, i was so ill prepared...

as you can see i was not ready to hike down a mountain, and either were jenna's socks. but my "hiking" shoes remind me of hillary's "camping" shoes when she was little. her sunday school shoes. oh classic times and crazy days.

and of course once we got to the bottom we realised that we took the hard way down and that if at the beginning we had turned we could of gone the easy way down and my ankles wouldnt have swollened up to the size of tree trunks. oh well. when in norway....

once we got down we stopped by the hostel and then went into town to try and see what was going on and see if we could find something to eat. there was an easy way to get into town but we didnt take it. we went the longest route possible, it was horrible. we were in so much pain but we finally made it into bergen had dinner and scrammed since we were all exhausted.

the next day we properly explored bergen! we went down to the harbour where we explored the fish market, i tried a lot of different fish that they had for samples, including whale. it was crazy, but really good too. the day was really overcast and there was a heavy fog hanging in the mountains with an on and off rain. we hung out by the harbour for a long time where we caught lunch i had an AMAZING cod soup like thing, holy moly so good! we went to some churches, and really just ran around all day looking at different things. bergen is what i always pictured when i thought about norway. a fishing town that is really laid back pace, it was amazing.

a statue in front of mcdonalds....doesnt look a like a place that i would chose to put a statue like that...the bergen harbour...the houses on the side of the harbour. these are the houses that are synanomous (did i spell that right? most likely not) with bergen.

ok i need a break from blogging...so i can make this a two parter! how brilliant is that? very much so.